Monday, February 20, 2012

Movie Review: "No Strings Attached"


            In an effort to keep myself funny I am going to try to write a movie review a day for the next 30 days.  This will be exhausting but I have done it before, so when I fail this time I really won't have the excuse of going beyond my means.  For the sake of simplicity I will just review all of the movies that came out in 2011 that I saw.

            Since it is hard to be funny with movies that are good, I will start things off with the worst movie I watched all the way through, "No Strings Attached".

See how they are laughing?  It is a lie.
             Contrary to what you, or most people who have met me might believe I am not a vindictive person, I don't wish ill on anyone, and I do not want anyone to fail, what I want is for people to do good works, succeed at doing those good works, and then have the fame, wealth, and clout to constitute making more good stuff.  This is why I look at "No Strings Attached" as only slightly better than being trapped in an elevator... and really I'm not entirely certain it is better.

I am fairly certain I could entertain myself more than this movie entertained me.
             This movie is slow, dumb, uneventful, spectacularly cast, and unfunny.  There are maybe four or five funny lines in this entire film, all but one of which I have forgotten, because the others depended entirely on the situation they are presented.

            How much money could they have possibly paid all of these people to appear in this movie?  To waste their time and talents on it?  I looked it up $25,000,000.  And considering how there are no space ships, aliens, anything remotely interesting to look at, or even a criminally large amount of hair gel, I must assume all of this money was spent getting Kevin Kline to come on to set and be the best thing about this movie; which as far as accomplishments go, is kind of like not choking while eating yogurt.

            What is weird is how this movie came out twice, a star actress from the "Black Swan" does a movie where she casually has sex with an attractive guy and then falls in love.  It's like when those two "Capote" movies came out within a year of each other, except "Strings" and "Friends with Benefits" came out 5 months apart.  This might be unfair criticism as I have not watched, nor will I ever watch "Friends", but doesn't this piss off anyone else?

Wait.  What?... What?
             What is more "Strings" is really mean spirited.  A lot of characters who are really just out for their own interests and have their own perspectives and needs are seen as douche bags or jerks, but aren't even given enough screen time to be real villains.  Like the rival love interest for Natalie Portman, there is one scene were he calls Ashton Kutcher a dildo with legs (essentially) and how Portman will eventually tire of Ashton in favor of a real relationship with him, in the epilogue he is seen having a gay fling, and that may just be the second instance he is in the movie at all, like this guys comeuppance was to find out he was gay, which is insulting to both gay people and the character's position (speaking as a guy, if you have a crush on a woman who is banging what appears to be a functional retard like Ashton appears to be, I can't really see an issue with telling him off).  It is cheap and dumb and everything goes nowhere, there is no philosophical question to this movie, it is just a tangled mess of anti-jokes.

You know what, I take that back, anti-jokes are funny in an ironic sense.
            Lastly, and this will be my most juvenile complaint, for a movie about fucking, there is a shockingly small amount of nudity.  This film is incredibly tame on that front, and if you switched over fuck, to hell or bitch this movie could have been a PG-13 (or not, it is a movie about a woman enjoying sex, that might default to an R rating because such thoughts corrupt the young).  This movie even lacks the sting of the occasional tit shot.  That is how timid it is, a movie about casual sex, doesn't show a titty.  LAME.

Considering how much she shows off in this it is pretty clear that Portman did not think "Strings" was worth her nudity, and I imagine the other actresses followed her lead.
 Final Rating: 1 out of 5 (yes, I have seen worse; yes, in 2011; but I turned them off before finishing them, I will do a two pack on those at some point)

Some other Reviewers:

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